Most philosophical and linguistic theorizing about meaning focuses on cooperative forms of communication. However, much verbal communication involves parties whose interests are not fully aligned, or who do not know their degree of alignment. In such contexts, speakers sometimes turn to insinuation: implicatures that permit deniability about risky attitudes and contents. I argue that insinuation is a form of speaker's meaning in which speakers communicate potentially risky attitudes and contents without adding them to the conversational record, or sometimes even to (...) the common ground. (shrink)

In a recent book (_Lying and insincerity_, Oxford University Press, 2018), Andreas Stokke argues that one lies iff one says something one believes to be false, thereby proposing that it becomes common ground. This paper shows that Stokke’s proposal is unable to draw the right distinctions about insincere performative utterances. The objection also has repercussions on theories of assertion, because it poses a novel challenge to any attempt to define assertion as a proposal to update the common ground.

(Penultimate Draft). I consider common ground in its evolutionary context and argue for several claims. First, common ground is widely (though not universally) distributed among social animals. Second, the use of common ground is favored (i.e. is predicted to emerge and subsequently persist) among populations of animals whose members face recurrent interdependent decision-making problems in which the benefit of their courses of action are contingent on the variable choices of their stable social partner(s). Third, humans deploy cognitive (...) and social mechanisms for establishing and updating common ground that are not deployed by other living animals—the use of common ground has not only persisted within the human lineage but been amplified as well. Finally, I suggest that some of these points count against the iterative construal of common ground. In its place, I propose an alternative psychological construal of common ground in terms of what I will call reciprocal responsiveness. (shrink)

Public reason views hold that the exercise of political power must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens. A growing number of philosophers argue that this reasonable acceptability principle (RAP) can be justified by appealing to the value of civic friendship. They claim that a valuable form of political community can only be achieved among the citizens of pluralistic societies if they refrain from appealing to controversial ideals and values when justifying the exercise of political power to one another. This paper (...) argues against such accounts. In order to justify RAP, one must explain and defend a conception of reasonableness. Civic friendship is unfit to perform this task, rendering it unable to ground public reason alone. Meanwhile, pluralist views that combine civic friendship with other considerations in order to specify RAP either fail or make civic friendship a spare wheel in the argument for public reason. (shrink)

This is part one of a two-part paper, in which we develop an axiomatic theory of the relation of partial ground. The main novelty of the paper is the of use of a binary ground predicate rather than an operator to formalize ground. This allows us to connect theories of partial ground with axiomatic theories of truth. In this part of the paper, we develop an axiomatization of the relation of partial ground over the truths (...) of arithmetic and show that the theory is a proof-theoretically conservative extension of the theory PT of positive truth. We construct models for the theory and draw some conclusions for the semantics of conceptualist ground. (shrink)

I explore the logic of ground. I first develop a logic of weak ground. This logic strengthens the logic of weak ground presented by Fine in his ‘Guide to Ground.’ This logic, I argue, generates many plausible principles which Fine’s system leaves out. I then derive from this a logic of strict ground. I argue that there is a strong abductive case for adopting this logic. It’s elegant, parsimonious and explanatorily powerful. Yet, so I suggest, (...) adopting it has important consequences. First, it means we should think of ground as a type of identity. Second, it means we should reject much of Fine’s logic of strict ground. I also show how the logic I develop connects to other systems in the literature. It is definitionally equivalent both to Angell’s logic of analytic containment and to Correia’s system G. (shrink)

This research report examines one of the most profound conceptual developments in the history of Western thought: the transition from the impersonal metaphysical principle of Anaximander’s apeiron to the personal, divine, and incarnate reality of the Johannine Logos. Situating Anaximander within the broader Pre-Socratic search for the archē, the study analyzes the emergence of the apeiron as an abstract, boundless, and impersonal ontological ground designed to resolve the problem of opposites in early Greek cosmology. It then traces the philosophical (...) evolution of the concept of logos through Heraclitus, Stoicism, and Hellenistic Judaism, culminating in the Prologue of the Gospel of John. -/- Through a detailed comparative analysis, the report argues that while both the apeiron and the Logos function as first principles, they represent fundamentally different metaphysical paradigms. Greek philosophy tends toward an understanding of ultimate reality as an abstract, impersonal, and rational principle, whereas the Johannine Logos is presented as a personal, relational, and incarnate divine reality. The study concludes that the Johannine identification of the Logos not only engages Greek philosophical categories but ultimately transcends and transforms them by redefining the ontological ground of reality as personal and historically revealed rather than impersonal and metaphysical. . (shrink)

I seek to advance plausible replies to the several criticisms Kai Horsthemke makes of ‘African Modal Relationalism’, his label for my theory of animal rights with a sub-Saharan pedigree. Central to this view is the claim that, roughly, a being has a greater moral status, the more it is in principle capable of relating communally with characteristic human beings. Horsthemke maintains that this view is anthropocentric and speciesist, is poorly motivated relative to his egalitarian-individualist approach, and does not have the (...) implications that I contend. I aim to rebut these and related criticisms, contending that African Modal Relationalism is in fact a promising way to philosophically ground animal rights. (shrink)

The main aim of this dissertation is to model the different ways in which we use language when we engage with fiction. This main aim subdivides itself into a number of puzzles. We all know that dragons do not exist. Yet, when I read the Harry Potter novels, I do accept the existence of dragons. How do we keep such fictional truths separate from ‘ordinary’ non-fictional truths? What is the difference between Tolkien writing down all sorts of falsities, and a (...) liar who also says all sorts of untrue things? How can it be true that Frodo was born in the Shire while it is also true that he was invented by Tolkien? Given that a fiction such as Pride and Prejudice is not about the actual world, how can I learn things about 19th century etiquette in England by reading this novel? -/- I develop a coherent semantic analysis of these different puzzles: the ‘workspace account’. This theory is an extension of Stalnaker’s famous pragmatic ‘common ground’ framework. In this framework, assertions are modelled as proposals to update the ‘common ground’ (the set of shared assumptions) between conversational interlocutors. (shrink)

This article presents a historical-philosophical reconstruction of the function of the Absolute in Western thought. Its aim is not to provide an exhaustive history of doctrines of the Absolute, nor to revive a traditional metaphysics of ultimate ground. Instead, it asks what work the concept of the Absolute has performed across different epochs, and why this function persists even when the word “Absolute” itself becomes philosophically suspect. -/- The main thesis is that the history of the Absolute can be (...) read as a gradual shift in emphasis: from its primary role as ground — in figures such as the One, the Good, God, substance, and system — through the problem of the unpredicable and the critique of totality, to its contemporary significance as the limit of theoretical, ontological, and meaningful closure. -/- The article traces this transformation through ancient philosophy, apophatic theology, medieval metaphysics, early modern rationalism, Kant, German Idealism, absolute idealism, twentieth-century philosophy of language and being, and contemporary forms of final-theory thinking. It argues that the Absolute is neither the final object of thought, nor a final theory, nor a completed system. Rather, it is the structural limit at which every claim to final totalisation encounters its own impossibility. -/- The conclusion is that the contemporary significance of the Absolute lies not in completing thought, but in preventing thought from falsely completing itself. The Absolute preserves thought’s orientation toward unity, ground, and meaning, while disciplining it against premature capture, ontological inflation, and illegitimate totalisation. (shrink)

This paper completes the foundational proof that the first paper in this series — Reality Is Triune: A Metaphysical Argument for Agápē as First Principle — assumed but did not fully establish. That paper demonstrated that agápē is the only relational mode capable of grounding being, but it did so without first proving that its elimination criteria were themselves necessary rather than chosen. A critic could therefore charge that the criteria were selected to predetermine the conclusion. This paper closes that (...) vulnerability. The argument proceeds in two stages. The first derives, by transcendental argument, three conditions that any sufficient ground of being must satisfy: generativity — the capacity to give rise to actuality rather than merely describe it; non-coercion — the preservation of real distinction without domination or absorption; and coherence — the maintenance of stable, intelligible relational order. These are not evaluative preferences. They are the irreducible structural requirements for any world in which beings exist, differ, and can be understood. To deny any one of them is to deny the possibility of determinate being. The second stage performs an exhaustive elimination across the complete logical space of possible relational modes, organized by a principled binary taxonomy. Every alternative — coercive, competitive, indifferent, emanative, neutral-structural, dyadic — fails at least one necessary condition. Agápē alone satisfies all three simultaneously. It is not selected. It is what remains. The result is a categorical upgrade to the entire series: if anything exists and is intelligible, the ground of being must be agápēic, and triune structure follows as the minimal architecture capable of eternally actualizing it. Nothing simpler can sustain relation. Nothing more complex is required. (shrink)

This essay begins with a warning: Nietzsche has not been understood. What parades as interpretation is John Sallis’ “deceptive intelligibility” – a hall of mirrors masquerading as clarity, engineered to bury Nietzsche’s philosophical sabotage. Nietzsche’s thought, like quantum theory, explodes causality, truth, and identity – not metaphorically, but ontologically. His aphorisms do not simply describe the world; they interfere with it. They collapse the observer into the observed, entangling meaning with force, knowledge with will, thought with becoming. He is not (...) a philosopher of answers but of ruptures – epistemic fractures that reverberate across disciplines and time. Art, science, philosophy and myth combust into co-authored vortices – no maps, only collisions of perspective. From Heraclitus to Heisenberg, from tragic myth to wave-particle paradoxes, Nietzsche’s legacy emerges as a gravitational field – disabling our coordinates, annihilating philosophical ground. The five outstanding explorations of Nietzsche’s philosophy reviewed here do not explain Nietzsche; they accelerate his destabilizing charge, colliding at the edges of interpretation to generate new hybrids of thought. Against the fixity of meaning, Nietzsche offers a reality in superposition. The question is no longer what Nietzsche meant, but how much conceptual collapse we can endure when we stop containing him. To understand Nietzsche is not simply to interpret, but to embrace Nietzschean singularity. (shrink)

A dispositional property is a tendency, or potency, to manifest some characteristic behaviour in some appropriate context. The mainstream view in the twentieth century was that such properties are to be explained in terms of more fundamental non-dispositional properties, together with the laws of nature. In the last few decades, however, a rival view has become popular, according to which some properties are essentially dispositional in nature, and the laws of nature are to be explained in terms of these fundamental (...) dispositions. The supposed ability of fundamental dispositions to ground natural laws is one of the most attractive features of the dispositional essentialist position. In this paper, however, I cast doubt on the ability of dispositional essences to ground the laws of nature. In particular I argue that the dispositional essentialist position is not able to coherently respond—sympathetically or otherwise—to Cartwright's challenge that there are no true general laws of nature. (shrink)

This paper introduces a speculative reinterpretation of gravity, termed the “ground is falling to apple” theory. Unlike Newtonian and Einsteinian frameworks that allow for stable orbital motion, this perspective denies the long-term possibility of orbit. Instead, all masses are in continuous mutual motion toward one another, such that orbital stability is ultimately unsustainable. We formalize the idea with a discrete-time time-slot propagation model in which objects re-form each tick of time and an effective gravitational strength depends on a temporal (...) density parameter. The account is intentionally nonstandard and conflicts with established physics; its value here is conceptual and programmatic. (shrink)

The semantic value of a demonstrative in a given context is the object of joint attention shared by the participants in a conversation, which King refers to as the ‘coordinated object.’ This is at least the case when the speaker’s plan to align perspectives is successful. However, when there is a conflict between the intended reference and what is made manifest by a demonstration, either no coordinated object is established, or the semantic value is the demonstratum. This is King’s response (...) to Kaplan’s Carnap/Agnew scenario. His explanation does not address how the reference to an object becomes part of the common ground. Reference selection always occurs against a doxastic background and results from the collaborative efforts of the agents involved in the conversation. I propose an amendment to King’s coordination account that more accurately reflects the collaborative nature of referring. However, it is uncertain whether this amendment results in a metasemantics for demonstratives. The introduction of a reference to an object in the common ground exhibits the distinctive features of pragmatic processes. (shrink)

This paper develops a phenomenological account of unity grounded in awareness rather than ideology, metaphysics, or institutional belief systems. Drawing primarily from Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, while critically engaging modern scientific perspectives such as those influenced by Albert Einstein, the study argues that the Earth and the universe are encountered only as phenomena within awareness. Rather than treating unity as a metaphysical substance or political construct, the paper situates unity within shared experiential structures—intentionality, embodiment, temporality, and perception. (...) Extending beyond classical phenomenology, the argument proposes that awareness functions as a non-divisive ground in which world, self, and others co-arise. While resonating in certain respects with non-dual insights associated with Adi Shankaracharya, the inquiry remains strictly phenomenological, refraining from ontological claims about ultimate substance. The central thesis maintains that unity is not constructed through belief but uncovered within lived experience. By shifting the question from “What is the universe in itself?” to “How does the universe appear?”, the paper repositions awareness as the primary condition of meaningful access to reality. Unity, therefore, is neither ideological nor doctrinal—it is phenomenologically given. (shrink)

Bernard Williams argues that ground projects give meaning to a person’s life and furnish her with reasons for living. However, a question arises: what happens when these ground projects collapse? Does meaning in life disappear, or can it still persist? Williams says little about this issue. In this paper, I argue that, in some cases, after the collapse of ground projects, we can experience the emergence of a joy of being alive (“the joy of life”) even amid (...) dark and desperate situations. There are at least three routes through which such joy can arise: “the power of nothingness in bare life,” “an encounter with unimaginable situations,” and “the process of recalling moments of the affirmation of living.” Using these concepts, I discuss what kinds of processes can sustain us during dark and desperate days following the collapse of ground projects. (shrink)

Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink over the past few years exploring the nature and significance of grounding. Kit Fine has made several seminal contributions to this discussion, including an exact treatment of the formal features of grounding [Fine, 2012a]. He has specified a language in which grounding claims may be expressed, proposed a system of axioms which capture the relevant formal features, and offered a semantics which interprets the language. Unfortunately, the semantics Fine offers faces a number of (...) problems. In this paper, I review the problems and offer an alternative that avoids them. I offer a semantics for the pure logic of ground that is motivated by ideas already present in the grounding literature, and for which a natural axiomatization capturing central formal features of grounding is sound and complete. I also show how the semantics I offer avoids the problems faced by Fine’s semantics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the ground of being must be triunely structured, and that this conclusion follows from a single metaphysical commitment: that to exist is to be relational, and that the only form of relation capable of sustaining determinate, intelligible being without collapse is agápē — non-coercive, self-giving, distinction-preserving actuality. The argument proceeds by elimination. A monadic ground cannot internally actualize self-giving relation; it collapses into self-repetition, which is not genuine relation but its formal negation. A dyadic (...) ground fares no better: symmetric dyads collapse distinction, while asymmetric dyads introduce dependence and undermine the unconditional character required of any genuine ground. Only a triadic structure — constituted by three irreducible relational roles, source, recipient, and bond — can simultaneously sustain unity without homogeneity, distinction without division, and self-giving without external dependence. The paper establishes that these three roles are not parts of a composite whole but constitutively defined orientations within a single undivided act of being: each role is what it is only through its relation to the others, and none can exist apart. This constitutive mutual definition is what makes the ground both genuinely triune and genuinely simple — not the simplicity of an undifferentiated block, but the simplicity of a relational act that is internally complete. From this internal completeness follow three further results: creation is contingent rather than necessary, since a ground that is already relationally complete has no structural need to produce anything external; creaturely freedom is ontological rather than psychological, arising from the non-coercive character of the ground's own act; and time belongs to finite potentiality, not to the ground itself, which is eternally actual. The argument makes no theological assumptions. The triune structure is a metaphysical consequence, not a doctrinal inheritance, and any theological resonance is a result of the analysis, not a condition of it. (shrink)

The Perennial Philosophy centres around what is said to be a recurring mystical insight: that our inherent nature is actually pure, unconditioned consciousness, identical to the ground of all being. Perennial Idealism, the name I give to a metaphysical system I have been building, extrapolates from the Perennial Philosophy to explain how the world could be configured if it were in fact true. Among the most serious challenges faced is that of articulating and defending the very notion that our (...) world is grounded in universal consciousness. This chapter further develops a line of reply to what I think are four major objections to the idea that universal consciousness grounds all being. I call these the Thales Objection, the Problem of the One and the Many, the Self-defeating Objection, and the Power Challenge. (shrink)

Two of the most fundamental structural features of quantum mechanics — the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Pauli exclusion principle — are standardly treated as posits: brute facts about the physical world that quantum theory describes but does not explain. This paper argues that both receive principled ontological grounding from Constraint Theory (CT), the thesis established by transcendental argument that constraint is the ontological primitive constitutive of determinate existence as such. On the CT account, determinate physical entities are constituted by (...) their constraint profiles — the specific exclusion relations that individuate them from everything they are not. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is shown to reflect the conjugate structure of quantum constraint topology: position-space constraint and momentum-space constraint are dual expressions of a single underlying constraint structure, related by Fourier duality, such that closing one dimension of possibility space structurally requires opening the conjugate dimension. The Pauli exclusion principle is shown to be the direct physical expression of CT’s foundational claim that to be is to exclude: fermions are individuated through mutual exclusion, and the impossibility of two fermions occupying the same quantum state is the ontological requirement that distinct entities must differ in their constraint profiles. The fermion/boson distinction is given a unified structural interpretation: fermions are entities individuated by state-exclusion; bosons are entities whose mode of individuation does not proceed through state-exclusion. The paper engages the principal interpretive positions in the philosophy of quantum mechanics and the literature on quantum particle individuality, and argues that the CT account provides explanatory depth that these positions presuppose but do not supply. (shrink)

This paper advances the Consciousness-Structured Field Theory (CSFT) by formalizing the claim that the persistence of material reality presupposes resonance with a primordial consciousness field. The argument traces the dependence of particles, cells, and neural structures on this ontological ground. If consciousness is primary, the brain’s role as a receiver of consciousness follows as a logical consequence rather than an anomaly.

This paper examines the relationship between two influential accounts of assertion: Robert Stalnaker’s model of assertion as a proposal to update the common ground (CG), and Timothy Williamson’s normative account, which holds that assertion is governed by the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA). While often treated as distinct or even competing frameworks, I argue that each view faces explanatory gaps that the other is well positioned to fill. While Stalnaker’s model struggles to distinguish assertions from other CG-updating speech acts (...) like assumptions or conjectures, Williamson’s KNA lacks an independently motivated descriptive criterion for identifying the speech act it regulates. I propose a hybrid view in which assertion is defined both by its role in updating the CG and by its subjection to the knowledge norm. This account helps individuate assertion within a broader class of assertoric speech acts by their submission to KNA, and grounds Williamson’s constitutivity claim in the conversational structure outlined by Stalnaker. The paper concludes by addressing potential compatibility challenges between the two frameworks and suggests that their integration yields a philosophically stronger account—one that reflects the dual role of assertion as both a pragmatic move and an epistemically assessable commitment. (shrink)

This paper is a simple reminder for cosmology enthusiasts of the bright line separating the laws of physics from science fiction. It provides some tools: rules, guidelines and a definition of space useful for examining cosmology science claims and concepts. It explains the stringent thresholds for an idea before it can accurately be called a scientific theory or hypothesis; and who bears the burden of proof for a theory. These simple tools provide solid ground so you may more easily (...) examine cosmology claims to help make up your own mind which side of the science/science fiction line a specific claim belongs on. (shrink)

In my old manuscript “Formal Theology” that now is out as a preprint I show that science and theology can be founded upon the same set of basic assumptions. I now follow up this idea with the thought that Formal Theology may be used to ground also a religion. “Religion“, in this regard, as related to beliefs. I’m not going into any details, neither concerning the original manuscript, nor this new idea. The important thing, I think, is to explore (...) if this kind of “religion”, in any way, can be accommodated with “ordinary” religions. I leave more rigorous work to myself or to others for the future. (shrink)

I develop several new arguments against claims about "cognitive phenomenology" and its alleged role in grounding thought content. My arguments concern "absent cognitive qualia cases", "altered cognitive qualia cases", and "disembodied cognitive qualia cases". However, at the end, I sketch a positive theory of the role of phenomenology in grounding content, drawing on David Lewis's work on intentionality. I suggest that within Lewis's theory the subject's total evidence plays the central role in fixing mental content and ruling out deviant interpretations. (...) However I point out a huge unnoticed problem, the problem of evidence: Lewis really has no theory of sensory content and hence no theory of what fixes evidence. I suggest a way of plugging this hole in Lewis's theory. On the resulting theory, which I call " phenomenal functionalism", there is a sense in which sensory phenomenology is the source of all determinate intentionality. Phenomenal functionalism has similarities to the theories of Chalmers and Schwitzgebel. (shrink)

Logical pluralism faces the collapse problem, as formulated by Stei (2023): any position that simultaneously affirms a plurality of correct logics, competition among them at the level of application, and the normativity of logical consequence will inevitably collapse into monism or nihilism. Existing responses—whether appealing to derivative normativity (Tajer, 2024) or metalinguistic stipulation—leave a more fundamental question unanswered: in virtue of what can different logical systems coexist and be compared at all? This paper argues that the root of the dilemma (...) lies in the fact that every logical system has always presupposed distinctions—true and false, premise and conclusion—yet has never asked about the conditions that make distinction possible. Through an argument from operational self-refutation and an analysis of asymmetric existential dependence, this paper establishes a minimal ontological structure: the possibility of distinction (the self-sufficient primal ground), distinction itself, and products of distinction. From this structure, three Primal Laws are derived by ontological reductio—the Primal Law of Non-Contradiction (the condition under which distinction is meaningful), the Primal Law of Excluded Middle (the binary exhaustion of distinction modalities), and the Primal Law of Identity (the non-self-sufficiency of distinction products)—together with a further derived Mutual Exclusion Principle. It is then shown that Leibniz’s principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals secretly presupposes all three Primal Laws. On this basis, the paper argues that Primal Logic constitutes the shared ground protocol underlying all logical systems, and provides a preliminary demonstration of its positive inferential capacity, thereby grounding logical pluralism without recourse to monism. Keywords: Primal Logic; the possibility of distinction; logical pluralism; collapse problem; Indiscernibility of Identicals. (shrink)

We will survey a range of ontologies relevant to space and ground system domains. The ontologies form part of the Common Core Ontology ecosystem (CCO) developed under the IARPA KDD initiative. We focus specifically on the Space Domain Ontologies, a suite of ontologies to support space situational awareness, including the Spacecraft Mission Ontology, Spacecraft Ontology, Space Event Ontology and Space Object Ontology.

Is it possible to recover lost moral ground? In the closing episodes of the TV show "Breaking Bad", it becomes clear that the protagonist, Walter White, believes that the correct answer to this question is an affirmative one. Walt believes that he can, and that he has, recovered lost moral ground. "Breaking Bad" may be said to explore two distinct and incompatible ways of attempting to recover lost moral ground. The first way is revisionist. This is to (...) rewrite the script of what, morally speaking, has occurred, so that it appears that nothing wrong was done. The second way is restorative. This is to admit to morally wrongful behavior, but to attempt to make amends for it. While we concede that it is possible to recover lost moral ground in both of these ways, we deny that Walt is able to do so in both of these ways. At best, Walt can only hope to recover lost moral ground by attempting to make amends for his past misdeeds. (shrink)

Hegel is a founding philosopher of political modernity. His accounts of history, and as well political institutions of bourgeois culture and society, are critical models and strategies for engaging what he calls negation. Negation does not simply belong to the “not” of judgement, but derives more substantively from the negativity of the desire of the Other, which has meaning. Negativity as the origin of negation originates with the negative instance of the subject, who expels part of itself in order that (...) it may come to be as being for itself and for the other. Hegel thus institutes the twofold ground of negation as precondition of logical thought. Drawing on Rebecca Comay’s Hegel and the French Revolution I show how negation and the self-justification of freedom necessarily intertwine across the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit . I begin with a study of the “form” of freedom in Stephen Houlgate and Kevin Thompson. Hegel’s Reason entails the universalism of history, which is in turn inseparable from the universalism of its ethics. That is, Hegel treats political modernity as rooted in systematic foundations that are inherently incomplete. The normativity of social bonds, an apt conception of a more radical sociality, is understood as inherently incomplete. (shrink)

Classical theistic arguments frequently appeal to modal logic in an attempt to establish the existence of a necessary personal being. This paper offers a diagnostic analysis of why such arguments cannot succeed. We distinguish three types of necessity logical–analytic (Class A), modal–structural (Class B), and existential necessity (Class C) and show that formal modal systems are jurisdictionally confined to the first two. Claims of necessary existence exceed the expressive and justificatory capacity of modal logic. We demonstrate that even minimal epistemic (...) openness suffices to collapse Class C necessity (Knife-Edge fragility), that strengthening modal systems amplifies rather than resolves this vulnerability (Modal Strength Inversion), and that the conditional structures employed in contemporary modal arguments function as semantic laundering devices that relocate rather than eliminate doubt. We further show that claims of necessary existence undermine the very modal space required to justify them, resulting in an instrument-level collapse of modal reasoning with respect to existence. Importantly, this critique does not reject the explanatory motivations behind classical theistic reasoning. On the contrary, we accept the structural constraints such arguments correctly identify non-contingency, simplicity, timelessness, and explanatory ultimacy. What fails is the inference from these structural constraints to agency. Once modal derivations and existential import are set aside, a third option becomes visible: constitutive causal structure, which satisfies all grounding constraints without invoking personhood. The paper’s conclusion is jurisdictional rather than metaphysical. It does not deny the existence of a personal ultimate ground. It shows only that modal logic cannot serve as the instrument for establishing it. (shrink)

This paper proposes a revised theological ontology in which Elohim is interpreted not as a personal tribal deity but as the universal Ground of Being—an impersonal, non-interventionist ontological source compatible with contemporary cosmology and comparative metaphysics. Within this tripartite framework, Yahweh is understood as a culturally mediated manifestation of the Ground within Israel’s covenantal imagination, while Jesus Christ is presented as the sole historical and personal self-disclosure of the Ground in human form. Drawing on philological analysis, ancient (...) Near Eastern contexts, Daoist and Buddhist metaphysics, and classical Christology, the paper distinguishes three levels: (1) Elohim as Ground; (2) Yahweh as narrative mediation; (3) Christ as ontological bridge. This model seeks to resolve long-standing tensions in classical theism—such as divine agency, immutability, the problem of evil, and religious pluralism—while preserving the uniqueness of Christ and enabling genuine dialogue with global philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Poorly saturated colors are closer to a pure grey than strongly saturated ones and, therefore, appear less “colorful”. Color saturation is effectively manipulated in the visual arts for balancing conflicting sensations and moods and for inducing the perception of relative distance in the pictorial plane. While perceptual science has proven quite clearly that the luminance contrast of any hue acts as a self-sufficient cue to relative depth in visual images, the role of color saturation in such figure-ground organization has (...) remained unclear. We presented configurations of colored inducers on grey ‘test’ backgrounds to human observers. Luminance and saturation of the inducers was uniform on each trial, but varied across trials. We ran two separate experimental tasks. In the relative background brightness task, perceptual judgments indicated whether the apparent brightness of the grey test background contrasted with, assimilated to, or appeared equal (no effect) to that of a comparison background with the same luminance contrast. Contrast polarity and its interaction with color saturation affected response proportions for contrast, assimilation and no effect. In the figure-ground task, perceptual judgments indicated whether the inducers appeared to lie in front of, behind, or in the same depth with the background. Strongly saturated inducers produced significantly larger proportions of foreground effects indicating that these inducers stand out as figure against the background. Weakly saturated inducers produced significantly larger proportions of background effects, indicating that these inducers are perceived as lying behind the backgrounds. We infer that color saturation modulates figure-ground organization, both directly by determining relative inducer depth, and indirectly, and in interaction with contrast polarity, by affecting apparent background brightness. The results point towards a hitherto undocumented functional role of color saturation in the genesis of form, and in particular figure-ground percepts in the absence of chromatostereopsis. (shrink)

We challenge an argument that aims to support Aesthetic Realism by claiming, first, that common sense is realist about aesthetic judgments because it considers that aesthetic judgments can be right or wrong, and, second, that becauseAesthetic Realism comes from and accounts for “folk aesthetics,” it is the best aesthetic theory available.We empirically evaluate this argument by probing whether ordinary people with no training whatsoever in the subtle debates of aesthetic philosophy consider their aesthetic judgments as right or wrong. Having shown (...) that the results do not support the main premise of the argument, we discuss the consequences for Aesthetic Realism and address possible objections to our study. (shrink)

Kant’s tragic brilliance lies in discovering the transcendental subject as the necessary condition for all experience. This analysis forms part of a broader systematic project concerned with the metalogical conditions of identity, reference, and intelligibility. While the present paper introduces the notion of a Primordial Identity Lock in schematic form, its aim is not to offer an independent metaphysical foundation, but to examine how Kant’s transcendental framework already presupposes structural conditions that it cannot itself thematize. We demonstrate that the “I (...) think” accompanying all representations relies on this Lock in three dimensions: (1) as the subject’s self-identity across time, (2) as the categorical framework’s stability, and (3) as the performative ground of the Critique itself. Kant’s achievement is tragic: he approaches the threshold of this Lock yet can only conceive it as a limit rather than as radiant source. (shrink)

Unlike identity physicalism, ground physicalism does not achieve the physicalist dream. It faces the T-shirt problem for ground physicalism (Pautz 2014; Schaffer this volume; Rubenstein ms). In the case of insentient nature, it may be able to get by with small handful of very general ground laws to explain the emergence of nonfundamental objects and properties – for example, a few “principle of plenitude”. But I argue that for the case consciousness it will require a separate huge (...) raft of special, anomalous psychophysical ground laws. So it is just as complex and nonuniform as dualism. (shrink)

Is there one univocal or generic notion of ground? Monists answer yes, while pluralists answer no. Pluralists argue that monism cannot meet plausible constraints on an adequate theory of ground. My aim in this paper is to articulate a monist theory of ground that can satisfy the pluralist constraints in a way that leaves the pluralists with no reasons not to endorse the monist picture of ground. I do this by adopting a tripartite conception of (...) class='Hi'>ground and then showing that it has the resources to vindicate monism while satisfying the pluralist constraints on a theory of ground. (shrink)

Essay I established the Hardlock Foundation: the complete zero-parameter derivational chain from absolute nothing to the primitive suite {E = 0.8, C = 0.7, F = 0.6, δ = 0.1} and the Phase I/II transition. One derivational gap remained open: G-1, the informational ground. The Hardlock asserted the Field Resolution Quantum δ = 0.1 and the Registration floor F = 0.6 on the basis of the ternary entropy ceiling and a discriminability threshold, but deferred the rigorous derivation of the (...) minimum bit-budget I_min ≈ 0.2 and its unique entailment of Base-10 discretisation to the present essay. This paper closes G-1 in full. We begin from the ternary triadic structure itself: a self-computing relational field with exactly three functional primitives generates a maximum entropy of H_max = log₂(3) ≈ 1.585 bits per coordinate locus. This ceiling is finite and structurally fixed by cardinality. We then derive the minimum bit-budget I_min ≈ 0.2 bits — the irreducible informational metabolic cost required for any locus to distinguish its own state from background noise — from the variance-partition geometry of the three-component system without invoking any external theorem as source. The ratio N = H_max / I_min ≈ 7.925 determines the number of resolvable levels; the twin constraints of covering N ≥ 8 at minimal resolution and representing the midpoint of equipoise ε = 0.5 as an exact lattice point together uniquely select Base-10 and fix δ = 0.1. With δ locked, the discriminability threshold r > 1/√3 ≈ 0.577 forces the Registration primitive F to snap to 0.6 — the unique minimum viable lattice point above the noise floor. F = 0.5 is explicitly in the Phantom Zone and is foreclosed. We then derive the Structural Volatility σ = 1 − F = 0.4 and the Structural Pixel ρ = δ × σ = 0.04 as the fundamental grain of indeterminacy — the mechanical clearance required to prevent deterministic crystallisation. The Saturation Threshold N_sat = 1/ρ = 25 follows directly. The Heartbeat of Becoming U = (Φ) × η = 0.002 × 1.667 ≈ 0.0033 is confirmed as the base processing rate of the self-computing Veldt. Every result is a zero-parameter consequence of the ternary triadic structure. No external theory is the logical source of any value. G-1 is closed. (shrink)

Although symmetry has been discussed in terms of a major law of perceptual organization since the early conceptual efforts of the Gestalt school (Wertheimer, Metzger, Koffka and others), the first quantitative measurements testing for effects of symmetry on processes of Gestalt formation have seen the day only recently. In this study, a psychophysical rating study and a “foreground”-“background” choice response time experiment were run with human observers to test for effects of bilateral symmetry on the perceived strength of figure-ground (...) in triangular Kanizsa configurations. Displays with and without bilateral symmetry, identical physically-specified-to-total contour ratio, and constant local contrast intensity within and across conditions, but variable local contrast polarity and variable orientation in the plane, were presented in a random order to human observers. Configurations with bilateral symmetry produced significantly stronger figure-ground percepts reflected by greater subjective magnitudes and consistently higher percentages of “foreground” judgments accompanied by significantly shorter response times. These effects of symmetry depend neither on the orientation of the axis of symmetry, nor on the contrast polarity of the physical inducers. It is concluded that bilateral symmetry, irrespective of orientation, significantly contributes to the, largely sign-invariant, visual mechanisms of figure-ground segregation that determine the salience of figure-ground in perceptually ambiguous configurations. (shrink)

Leibniz’s views on modality are among the most discussed by his interpreters. Although most of the discussion has focused on Leibniz’s analyses of modality, this essay explores Leibniz’s grounding of modality. Leibniz holds that possibilities and possibilia are grounded in the intellect of God. Although other early moderns agreed that modal truths are in some way dependent on God, there were sharp disagreements surrounding two distinct questions: (1) On what in God do modal truths and modal truth-makers depend? (2) What (...) is the manner(s) of dependence by which modal truths and modal truth-makers depend on God? Very roughly, Leibniz’s own answers are: (1) God’s intellect and (2) a form of ontological dependence. The essay first distinguishes Leibniz’s account from two nearby (and often misunderstood) alternatives found in Descartes and Spinoza. It then examines Leibniz’s theory in detail, showing how, on his account, God’s ideas provide both truth-makers for possibilities and necessities and an ontological foothold for those truth-makers, thereby explaining modal truths. Along the way, it suggests several refinements and possible amendments to Leibniz’s grounding thesis. It then defends Leibniz against a pair of recent objections by Robert Merrihew Adams and Andrew Chignell that invoke the early work of Kant. I conclude that whereas Leibniz’s alternative avoids collapsing into yet another form of Spinozism, the alternatives proposed by Adams, Chignell, and the early Kant do not. (shrink)

The past decade and a half has seen an absolute explosion of literature discussing the structure of reality. One particular focus here has been on the fundamental. However, while there has been extensive discussion, numerous fundamental questions about fundamentality have not been touched upon. In this chapter, I focus on one such lacuna about the modal strength of fundamentality. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the contingent fundamentality thesis - that is, the idea that the fundamentalia are only contingently (...) fundamental (or, in property-terms, that the property of being fundamental is not a (weakly) necessary property). And while I think this thesis is plausible – indeed, I show here that it lurks in the unexamined shadows/assumptions of some fairly prominent positions – as far as I can tell, nothing has been said either for or against it. Here, I hope to fix this by giving the thesis a proper airing. In this way, this chapter represents a first-pass at exploring not only the modal status of fundamentality, but also offers a starting point for examining broader issues about the relationship between fundamentality and modality. (shrink)

Linnebo in 2018 argues that abstract objects like numbers are “thin” because they are only required to be referents of singular terms in abstraction principles, such as Hume's principle. As the specification of existence claims made by analytic truths (the abstraction principles), their existence does not make any substantial demands of the world; however, as Linnebo notes, there is a potential counter-argument concerning infinite regress against introducing objects this way. Against this, he argues that vicious regress is avoided in the (...) account of arithmetic based on Hume's principle because we are specifying numbers in terms of the concept of equinumerosity, or its ordinal equivalent. But far from being only a matter for philosophy, this implies a distinct empirical prediction: in cognitive development, the principle of equinumerosity is primary to number concepts. However, by analysing and expanding on the bootstrapping theory of Carey in 2009, I argue in this paper that there are good reasons to think that the development could be the other way around: possessing numerosity concepts may precede grasping the principle of equinumerosity. I propose that this analysis of early numerical cognition can also help us understand what numbers as thin objects are like, moving away from Platonist interpretations. (shrink)

According to Russellian panpsychism, the physical is grounded in the mental, or more precisely, the phenomenal. This view has been argued to avoid the main problems of physicalism, according to which the mental is grounded in the physical, dualism, according to which the mental and the physical are co-fundamental, and subjective idealism, according to which only the mental is fundamental and the physical is merely an illusion. But on closer examination, pure panpsychism—according to which the physical is fully grounded in (...) the phenomenal—faces analogues of the main problems of either physicalism and subjective idealism, and impure panpsychism—according to which the physical is merely partially grounded in the phenomenal and partially in non-phenomenal relations or other features—faces analogues of the main problems of dualism. This paper offers a version of Russellian panpsychism, based on combining it with the phenomenal powers view (Mørch 2017, 2018a, 2019b), which avoids or at least significantly diminishes all these analogous problems. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the semantics for the logics of ground that derive from a slight variant GG of the logic of Fine (2012b) that have already been developed in deRosset and Fine (2023). Our aim is to outline that semantics and to provide a comparison with two related semantics for ground, given in Correia (2017) and Krämer (2018a). This comparison highlights the strengths and difficulties of these different approaches.

This paper establishes a sound and complete semantics for the impure logic of ground. Fine (Review of Symbolic Logic, 5(1), 1–25, 2012a) sets out a system for the pure logic of ground, one in which the formulas between which ground-theoretic claims hold have no internal logical complexity; and it provides a sound and complete semantics for the system. Fine (2012b) [§§6-8] sets out a system for an impure logic of ground, one that extends the rules of (...) the original pure system with rules for the truth-functional connectives, the first-order quantifiers, and λ-abstraction. However, no semantics has yet been provided for this system. The present paper partly fills this lacuna by providing a sound and complete semantics for a system GG containing the truth-functional operators that is closely related to the truth-functional part of the system of Fine (2012b). (shrink)

Water scarcity becoming major problem in many countries like India, Recent problems of critical shortage of water in so many parts of our country due to population, lack of water harvesting plans, excess wastage of water and extreme pollution of water bodies, bringing inaccurate estimation of ground water available in these parts. Still we facing challenge in our country for prediction of ground level water based on the various factors like rain fall, in order to address this issue (...) in this work developed analysis of various machine learning models to predict the ground level water for the data set available from the government side. This work deals with dataset considered from India official site and hydrological parameters consideration for different states of India. We conducted a laboratory experiment to test the ground penetrating radar (GPR) full-waveform forward and inverse modeling approach for electromagnetic wave propagation in water. The GPR system consisted of a vector network analyser combined with an air-launched, 0.8-2.2 GHz horn antenna, thereby setting up an ultra-wideband stepped frequency continuous-wave radar. The apparent frequency-, salinity-, and temperature-dependent dielectric permittivity and electrical conductivity of water were estimated by using existing electrical models. Using these models, the radar data could be simulated and a remarkable agreement was obtained with the laboratory measurements. Neglecting the frequency-, salinity-, and temperature-effects led to less satisfactory results, especially regarding signal amplitude. Inversion of the radar data permitted to reconstruct the air and water layer thicknesses, and to some extent, the water electrical properties. This analysis particularly showed the benefit of using proper water electrical models compared to commonly used simplified approaches in GPR forward and inverse modeling. Index Terms—Ground penetrating radar, full-waveform inversion, multi-layered media, and complex permittivity of water. (shrink)

The potential for enormous carbon emissions after fires makes peatlands a serious environmental hazard. Effective management is hampered by the labour intensive and real-time data-poor nature of conventional ground water level (GWL) monitoring in peatlands. issue study addressed issue by proposing an IoT system for real-time monitoring that uses neural network-based GWL prediction. The neural network forecasts GWL based on meteorological factors, giving the responsible party more time to take the necessary steps to lower the danger of fire in (...) peatlands. With a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) ranging from 3.554 to 4.920, the suggested neural network shows encouraging results and guarantees 99% accuracy within a 14.760 mm range of the real GWL. This research highlights the innovative method of combining neural networks and the Internet of Things for peatland GWL prediction, providing a major breakthrough in real-time monitoring and fire risk reduction techniques. The innovation is its capacity to use basic meteorological information to anticipate GWL in real-time, even in places without the resources for traditional monitoring. (shrink)

Empathy is a topic of continuous debate in the nursing literature. Many argue that empathy is indispensable to effective nursing practice. Yet others argue that nurses should rather rely on sympathy, compassion, or consolation. However, a more troubling disagreement underlies these debates: There’s no consensus on how to define empathy. This lack of consensus is the primary obstacle to a constructive debate over the role and import of empathy in nursing practice. The solution to this problem seems obvious: Nurses need (...) to reach a consensus on the meaning and definition of empathy. But this is easier said than done. Concept analyses, for instance, reveal a profound ambiguity and heterogeneity of the concept of empathy across the nursing literature. Since the term “empathy” is used to refer to a range of perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral phenomena, the presence of a conceptual ambiguity and heterogeneity is hardly surprising. Our proposal is simple. To move forward, we need to return to the basics. We should develop the concept from the ground up. That is, we should begin by identifying and describing the most fundamental form of empathic experience. Once we identify the most fundamental form of empathy, we will be able to distinguish among the more derivative experiences and behaviors that are addressed by the same name and, ideally, determine the place of these phenomena in the field of nursing. The aim of this article is, consequently, to lay the groundwork for a more coherent concept of empathy and thereby for a more fruitful debate over the role of empathy in nursing. In Part 1, we outline the history of the concept of empathy within nursing, explain why nurses are sometimes warry of adapting concepts from other disciplines, and argue that nurses should distinguish between adapting concepts from applied disciplines and from more theoretical disciplines. In Part 2, we show that the distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy—borrowed from theoretical psychology—has been a major factor in nurses’ negative attitudes toward emotional empathy. We argue, however, that both concepts fail to capture the most fundamental form of empathy. In Part 3, we draw on and present some of the seminal studies of empathy that can be found in the work of phenomenological philosophers including Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, and Edith Stein. In Part 4, we outline how their understanding of empathy may facilitate current debates about empathy’s role in nursing. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (...) (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology. (shrink)